... consequence of the American mishandling of the occupation, it was compounded by the fact that, despite its determination to maintain the 'Special Relationship', New Labour was not prepared to commit the resources necessary for the British forces to have any serious chance of completing their mission successfully. Troop numbers were wholly inadequate. The resulting fiasco has been largely hidden from public view, not least courtesy of the Murdoch press that celebrated the whole sad affair as a glorious victory. But historians are certain to see the Iraq War as marking the point at which Britain ceased to be a serious military power. Before moving on from the Middle East, it is worth noticing Brown's support for Zionism. ...

... the Constitutional Research Association, the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, and the British People's Party. In the case of the BNP, its leaders decided on a policy of deliberate camouflage. All mention of Fascism and National Socialism was banned, and while the party would still be anti-Jewish, this too would be carefully hidden. Instead the party would position itself as anti-Communist, rather than pro-Nazi. A few British Nazis travelled to Germany to make propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Reich. By far the best-known of these is the infamous William Joyce, 'Lord Haw-Haw', but there were also a number of others ...

... bloc was established and the 'hot' Cold War of previous decades was over. (Arguably it had been over since the Cuba missile crisis.) In this context IRD was a Cold War anachronism. Crozier and his ilk never believed in detente and thought that, if the Red Menace was less visible, it just meant it was better hidden. (This may just have been old men – and they were all men, I think – unable to change their minds . . . .) History tells us that Crozier and the cold warriors were wrong: since the demise of the Soviet Union no evidence has come to light supporting their view of it.6 Detente and ...

... The Russian Laundromat and Blackpool Football Club Andrew Rosthorn The Laundromat is a 20 billion dollar offshore money laundering racket exposed last month by the Sarajevo-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Its deepest secrets are still hidden in the British Virgin Islands, where fewer than 25,000 residents of fifteen tropical islands host the registered offices of 800,000 offshore companies. Researchers in the multinational OCCRP network have been tracking bankers who act as money launderers when they move the proceeds of both legal and illegal commerce – along with the profits of political corruption and tax evasion – out of Russia and Eastern Europe and into remote tax havens. Between January 2011 and October ...

... Switzerland and silenced after the war in a mental hospital. ' The Borenius mission to Geneva came to light in the diaries of Ulrich von Hassell, the anti-Nazi German diplomat executed in 1944 after the plot to kill Hitler. Most of his diaries were buried in the garden of his house in Ebenhausen, near Munich. Some were hidden in Switzerland. Von Hassell wrote in January 1941 that Carl Burckhardt of the Swiss Red Cross had 'looked me up in Geneva'. Von Hassell noted in the diary that 'very recently' Tancred Borenius 10 'RAF colluded in Hess flight' in Lobster 37 (Summer 1999). 11 John Harris and Richard Wilbourn, Rudolf Hess: Treachery ...

... espionage.5 If information is power, then information about adultery, homosexuality, and other private sexual indiscretions by officials is power of a high order indeed. Individuals and organizations that are adept at collecting and controlling such information – such as law enforcement, spies, private eyes, journalists and lawyers – thus play a key role in the hidden campaigns of the deep state. One perverse measure of the importance of sex in America's 'deep politics' is the paucity of systematic attention paid to it by political scientists.6 4 Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, One Nation Under Sex (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), provides numerous examples of sexual affairs and transgressions by ...

... felony break-in, ordered by the White House, to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. They were members of a secret 'Special Investigations Unit', created at Nixon's orders to engage in burglaries, forgery and other crimes to discredit his enemies and protect his most sensitive secrets. Perhaps the most explosive of his own hidden misdeeds was his treasonous intervention with South Vietnam during the 1968 campaign to prevent a bombing halt that might have swung the election to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.4 In other words, Nixon could not simply let the investigation of the Watergate burglary run its course lest it expose his other crimes. Both the Watergate burglary and Nixon's cover- ...

... title is fashioned like those of many typical exposés or what some might call 'muckraking' journalism. If this title gets more readers, then the means justifies the end. Yet I think the title is in fact a juxtaposition of two contrary perspectives of his subject. For Valentine's book to be an exposé it would have to reveal something previously hidden. In fact Valentine concludes his book with the entirely justifiable assertion that what he has described is in fact in plain sight, not hidden at all. A 'muckraking' story would take an otherwise tidy state of affairs and show that 'beneath it all' it is really very ugly and dirty. However, no later than the Church ...

... that many matters of historic significance have been kept secret for a long time. In the UK the success of the Bletchley Park codebreakers in accessing German communications during the Second World War was not revealed until 1974. At its peak, Bletchley had over 9,000 working there; yet discipline, loyalty and compartmentalisation ensured their activities remained long hidden from public view. Operation Gladio's long Cold War existence was only confirmed in 1990. By then the Soviet Union had collapsed and many citizens in Western Europe, especially in Italy, had died as a result of state organised false-flag operations.7 0 The Northwoods plan by the US government for a false-flag operation against ...